Product Managers and Product Owners: What’s the Difference?

Teresa Torres examines the difference between product managers and product owners, a question many companies ask her as a discovery coach. She traces how the product manager role evolved from traditional requirement-gathering from stakeholders, through Scrum's product owner as customer voice, to trio-based project discovery. She argues that adding a product owner to a discovery-heavy product manager often creates handoffs, pushes engineers further from customers, and produces unfulfilling work. Her recommendation is to move toward continuous discovery, where the product trio co-creates with customers and engineers stay close to discovery, using shared prototypes and artifacts to communicate.

01Key takeaways

• Keep engineers close to customer discovery so they become missionaries who understand the problem, not order-takers.
• Avoid splitting discovery and delivery into handoffs, which reintroduce the waterfall problems you were trying to escape.
• Communicate requirements with prototypes and discovery artifacts instead of long documents to convey complexity more clearly.
• Recognize that a need for both product managers and product owners often signals being stuck in project-based discovery.
• Let the product trio share the workload of discovery and delivery so a single person is not overwhelmed.

02Key sections

Traditional product management

The product manager sits between business stakeholders and engineers, turning stakeholder requirements into long documents handed off in a waterfall process. This tends to produce 'mercenary' teams that build what they are told.

The Scrum method

Scrum labeled the middle role the product owner and aimed it at being the voice of the customer, using shorter user stories and sprints. Yet teams often still gather requirements rather than learning from customers each sprint.

Project-based discovery

A product trio of product manager, designer and engineer co-creates with customers, but still hands requirements to delivery, causing cadence mismatches and overloading the product manager.

Adding a product owner

Splitting discovery and delivery roles reintroduces handoffs, pushes engineers further from discovery, and turns the product owner into an assembly-line role that drives turnover.

Continuous discovery

The trio keeps co-creating with customers while engineers join interviews, experiments and prototyping, and requirements are communicated through the same discovery artifacts.

03From the post

“For this month’s Product Talk post, I recorded a video where I consider the difference between product managers and product owners. You can watch the video or read an edited version of the transcript below. I want to talk about product managers and product owners. This is a topic”

04Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.